Yes, it’s been over 3 years since I’ve updated this blog. Honestly, I let the topic here get carried away, and I quickly lost interest in what it had become. Plus, many of my convictions have become more nuanced over the years, and I can’t agree with everything I have posted here. It will remain as a testament to my ignorance. May I never forget it.

So I have jump-started a new blog. You can find it at MattRob.com, formally named Captive Synapses. Instead of the Debbie Downer that this blog became, I hope to be more encouraging with the new one, with Christ put first.

Don't forget to subscribe to my full RSS feed to get daily updates of this blog!

Independent Country has crafted a great hypothetical response for Roger Clemens to use when he appears before the congressional hearing(aka, inquisition, witch hunt, etc.) about steroid use.

Mr. Chairman, I have read the Constitution and it does not grant you authority to ask the question or hold this hearing on my alleged steroid use. Therefore, I will exercise my rights as an American citizen under the Tenth Amendment, and my natural rights as a human being, and refuse to answer it.

The Constitution you have sworn your allegiance to gives the Congress few and specific powers. Prohibiting individual drug use is not one of them. This is clearly left to the states and to “the people,” as the Tenth Amendment says.

Continue reading Plead the Tenth.

We can dream, can’t we?

Don't forget to subscribe to my full RSS feed to get daily updates of this blog!

Leave it to Douglas Wilson, a much better writer than I am, to sum up the whole theme of this blog in just a few paragraphs.

Frederic Bastiat put it well — “Liberty is an acknowledgement of faith in God and his works.” Flip this around and we see that no society can or will have economic liberty unless there is a robust faith in God pervasive throughout that society. If there is no faith in God, we want to get in there and manage what everybody else is doing, and liberty dies. When we have faith, we let go. When we don’t believe, we clutch, preferably through our elected representatives.

And what’s truly sickening about it all is that it is the Christians who are so quick to kill liberty and clutch to their elected representatives. As Wilson shows, however, this is simply motivated by fear, and shows a supreme lack of faith.

You cannot have genuinely free markets without free men, and you cannot have free men without the gospel. If you do not have the gospel, then man will get in there somehow in order to try to save himself and others. He will try to save himself by using taxes, redistribution, lobbying influence, stimulus packages, environmental regulations, land reform, cozy deals with the government, and so on, ad infinitum.

In other words, he will try to save himself through violence and theft, which is nothing but base animal instinct.

We try to imagine life without our precious [government], and then we panic — and our panic chases us back into what we call prudence. We don’t know what liberty is, and so it scares us. We don’t know what liberty is because we don’t know what the gospel is, and we don’t know what the gospel is intended to do. Peter can’t walk on the water so long as he is holding on to the side of the boat.

It’s time to test the waters and let go of the boat.

Don't forget to subscribe to my full RSS feed to get daily updates of this blog!

Alright, so this blog was only started in August, but I will participate in the tradition anyway.

Thank you to all of my readers. I hope you have been encouraged/informed, as I certainly have been from the experience so far. Please let me know your thoughts below on how best to improve this blog and increase readership. What do you read this blog for, and how can I deliver more of that?

August:

The launch. This blog started off posting almost every day.

The post that put me “on the map”, or at least began the process, was my collection of thoughts on Ron Paul, and why he had me confused. My thoughts have evolved somewhat since then, and I hope to revisit them later.

I also began my Government in Scripture series. I admit to being somewhat out of material at the moment (I guess I need to read my Bible more…), but it went strong for a while.

If you have any scripture that relates to government that you would like to see commented on, please let me know. You can either do a guest post here, or just let me write something about it.

September:

The first full month. I began the Government Tyranny roundups, which are simply depressing to do, but necessary, I think.

This is the month I blew up with 2 popular posts.

One was a response to the Evangelical Outpost’s uneducated remarks on Ron Paul. And thanks to a mention on LewRockwell.com by Casey Khan, it met with mild success.

The dark waters of satire were also ventured into. I put up my tips on how to read the bible correctly, kind of just for fun, and it turned out to be my most popular post up to that point, generating 28 comments. I will definitely be doing more satire, as it is a great way of framing truth.

My piece on Christians using the violence of the state to accomplish their goals, thus calling their morality into question, encapsulates, I believe, what this blog is all about, and the mindset I want to combat. It stirred up some controversy, mainly because I used the venerable Dr. James Dobson as the example I picked on.

October:

This was the month that Sailorcurt and I went back and forth on foreign policy.

The only other thing of note this month was this blogs nomination as the 2007 Blogging Rookie of the Year. New Liberty Creation got lost in the midst of a large number of quality startups.

November:

November saw my single most popular post about The Golden Compass. It generated 40 comments, from several different sides of the polygonal argument, and is still getting traffic, even after the movie came and puttered away irrelevantly.

With my piece on Plato, I also began what I hope becomes a long series of posts that challenge the fundamental assumptions of modern Christianity. Should Christians look more like pagans holding to Plato’s idea of the soul, or should they look more Biblical?

December:

The slowest month so far, and least number of posts. I confess to losing some of my motivation, because I wasn’t seeing any progress, and readership plateaued no matter what I did. I got tantalizingly close to breaking 50 RSS readers one day in November, but then it plummeted to the mid-thirties and has never gotten higher since.

I hope to start the New Year off strong, however. Again I ask, what can I do to improve?

Thanks again for reading.

Don't forget to subscribe to my full RSS feed to get daily updates of this blog!

Of all the blog posts I read on Christmas, this one from Lew Rockwell is the one that truly moved me:

On this day in 1914, in the first year of the great civilizational disaster called WWI, German and British soldiers on the Western front stopped shooting. Not only that, they celebrated together, as brothers, the birth of the Prince of Peace. Their panicked leaders eventually forced them back to killing, but some day, the soldiers may not listen to the generals and the presidents, but to a Child born this day in Bethlehem. Then the angels’ song of “peace on earth” can begin to come true.

You can read more about the Christmas Truce here.

This is what I write for, and this is what I hope and pray for.

Christianity has everything to do with politics. When a group of men began proclaiming that a crucified, failed messiah was now Lord and Savior of the World, it was a direct challenge to principalities and powers at the time, especially Caesar. A true prince of peace, in contrast to the so-called Pax Romana that was drenched in the blood of common men and women.

So too is the gospel a direct challenge to the world’s rulers, including the evil men who perpetuated World War 1, sending men off to die for no purpose but to solidify their own power, thereby kicking off one of the bloodiest centuries this world has ever known. So much for the age of “enlightenment.”

I only hope that one day, we will stop listening to the politicians, as the soldiers did on the night of the Christmas Truce.

We will stop believing them when they insist we must kill this or that person.

We will stop believing them when they promise national glory.

We will stop believing them, and realize we have more in common with other people and nations than we were led to believe, like the soldiers discovered that time between the trenches.

Believing them only leads to death, for ourselves or others. History has shown no other outcome.

There is only one who deserves our trust, belief, and allegiance.

Don't forget to subscribe to my full RSS feed to get daily updates of this blog!